Born To Live
by TSCCS3Fan
Summary: Picking up after Born To Run, Born To Live chronicles Sarah's parallel journey to stop Kaliba by any means necessary and John's search for his beloved protector. *Chapter 8 Uploaded*
1. Chapter 1

******Born To Live**

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******Disclaimer: **I do not own any rights to the Terminator properties in any format. This story is purely done for fun and is my own creation. I wanted to see if I could write out a continuance of the television series while being faithful to both the series' tone, and that of the first two films.

******Permissions: **If anyone wants to use elements of the story please feel free, I only ask that credit is given at some point in your story.

I would like to thank Josh Friedman for adapting the story of the Terminator universe into a T.V. Format, and all of the cast and crew of the show for the wonderful 2 seasons they made. And lastly, James Cameron, who without which my life would be pretty damn boring.

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******Prologue:**

___ In 2011 Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence, became self-aware. Humanity became an unwilling participant in a war triggered by a near thermonuclear apocalypse. Survivors were scattered and on the verge of dying until they were united by a man; John Connor, my son._

___ I, Sarah Connor, tried in vein to protect and defend the world from the horrors laid out to me by a lone fighter from the future; but I failed that mission. Try as I could, I couldn't prevent Judgment Day...it was inevitable._

___ I was once under the belief that there was no hope for the human race. How can you battle an enemy that doesn't feel, eat, sleep, and spends every moment of its existence devoted to your extinction? It took me a long time to truly understand the message given to me by a fighter from the future; There is no fate but what we make for ourselves..._

___ When it hit me, it did so with enough force that my world collapsed around me. All of the bravado and walls of mirrors I had built around myself came crashing down from the unyielding pain caused by the messages meaning. _

___ My son was prophesied as the savior of mankind by Kyle Reese, his father from the future, and I had always treated him so. ____But he abandoned that path when he jumped forward in time to rescue his protector, a reprogrammed machine. He left with what little training I had given him in the past, and was thrust into the harsh realities of the future._

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******December, 2027**

******ZeiraCorp Basement**

******11:01PM**

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A faint crackle of electrical energy danced in the thin cold air of the crumbling basement of what was once ZeiraCorp. Its bluish-purple aura illuminated the decaying concrete scattered around the room at the same time of another spark of dazzlingly bright energy gave way to a hazy blue ball. Screaming arc's of electricity shot out of the sphere before the energy disappeared just as quickly as it had arrived leaving two bodies laying within the area where the electricity had originated. A teenage boy who looked to be on the cusp of adulthood and a slightly more-mature looking woman. Both of the figures were in a low crouching position but where the woman had an equally balanced posture the boy looked like he was about to topple over and sprawl out on the floor.

The red-haired woman stood upright with perfect ease while the boy by her side continued to hunch over and struggle to keep his balance. Both of them were bare-skinned in the concrete jungle basement letting them feel the cold air began to penetrate the warm aura of the air surrounding them. With a few quick breaths and bringing his arms up to hug his chest, the boy seemed to compensate for his lack of clothing against the elements while the woman looked absolutely unaffected by the drastic change in temperature they had experienced.

Another chill ran down the boy's spine causing him to tightening his arms across his chest and look frantically around the scarce room for something to shield his body from the damaging cold. He saw nothing at first but the frost speckling the edges of the broken pieces of concrete, even the makeshift wire rigging for the light-bulbs out in the hallway had frost clinging to them.

_We're definitely in the right place,_ John told himself as he exhaled and saw his breath create a dense fog in front of his face. _Fuck, it must be near freezing in here..._

In part John was not surprised by the bitter cold that welcomed them into the future, much of his life had been spent preparing for the harsh environment that had awaited him ever since his mother first told him of his predestined path. The effects of thermonuclear weapons had been part of that case-study, especially when a cyborg by the name of Uncle Bob had explained it to him and the Dyson's a few years prior. Even with that preparedness though, he still reeled from the cold when it nipped against his skin.

He took a step forward and checked his surroundings again while the woman by his side made this odd sweeping motion with her head and neck. It was a movement that, to John, resembled a motion controlled security camera, or the swishing motion of a shark as it hunted its prey. Her eyes moved from left to right scanning the contents of the room and her head followed in unison only a split second after, missing nothing and seeing everything.

John looked back at the woman to see her fully dressed in some garb that resembled a more hard edged version of an indie-punk-rocker look. Her hair was tied up into a bun and her face was bare of all the makeup she had been wearing prior to their arrival. The long overcoat and messy pants coupled with the torn shirt lead him to believe that she had copied the look from someone in the future before her original travel back in time.

Desperate to find something of his own to wear, John looked across the bleak interior of the basement again but saw nothing other then broken pieces of concrete with wires for electric lighting darting across the makeshift ceiling of the hallway. The remains remains of the gleaming white concrete now had twisted pieces of iron rebar protruding from the walls and a few skulls littered the ground around his feet. Hollow eyes stared back at him from the bleached white recesses of the human remains as he tried to peel his eyes from looking at them.

"Where's Cameron? Where's her body?" John asked, flashing the woman standing by his side a questionable look after not finding anything to wear again.

"It doesn't go through," she replied clinically, though the expression across her face seemed to resemble an almost sympathetic stance. Within another second she resumed her methodical sweep of the barren basement.

With his strange curiosity taking over again, John cast one more look across the room before seeing some form of cloth resting on the far side of the entrance to the hallway outside. His ears and eyes kept themselves busy with discerning other signs of life as his body ran over to take the coat and drape it around himself. The friction caused by rubbing his arms furiously against the cloth caused his skin to warm up slightly, but still did nothing for the shocking cold against his legs and feet.

"Be on your guard," came the woman's voice by his side when she peered out of the doorway and into the hall. In the distance she could hear a man conversing with another human a mere twenty-or-so feet away from them.

A quick scan of her surroundings revealed the dialect to be of Spanish origins but the canine barking in the background seemed to be emitting with enough tone and frequency to suggest it came from a large breed.

"We have visitors, Mr. Connor," she explained while taking a step back inside the basement as John peered out of the doorway and down the hall to where the voices were originating.

John crouched for cover just as a black female came into view escorting a large German Shepard by her side. He peeked out over the boulder he was hiding behind to see the woman and dog round the corner and continue down the hallway. She was brandishing a large and bulky looking rifle that appeared to be way too large for human usage.

No sooner had she and the dog passed his position then along came another person following behind her closely. Like the woman, this man also carried a large rifle with a German Shepard trotting alongside him and they too rounded the corner and continued down the hallway. He paused for a moment to double-check their rear flank before turning around and following the woman in front of him again.

Anxiety and tension built itself to a peak within his body until John felt a compulsion to get out of the room as quickly as possible. Taking one final look down the corridor to his right to make sure the coast was clear, he stepped out into the hallway at the same time that two men appeared from a hole in the basement wall in front of him. One of them, a man of mixed complexion, called out to others that were gathered in the area behind the recessed hole in the wall.

"Got one!" The man raised his weapon and aimed it squarely at John's chest.

The man didn't seem to be taking any chances with his appearance in the cold dilapidated hallway, he could already hear the low hum of energy beginning to charge within the large rifle pointed at him. John didn't blame the man, though he really hoped that soon the mistake would be realized and he would lower the weapon. If the time coordinates were right he had arrived in 2027, just before the arrival of the T-800's according to his mother which would explain the paranoia surrounding unknown persons skulking around.

"GOT ONE!" the man repeated in a yelling manner. He took another step closer towards John, the dull hum of energy growing slightly louder in the close space of the hall.

John instinctively held his hands up in a surrendering manner as a sign of good faith, it always went over well in the long run. Very rarely in his experience did pushing the issue in a tense situation pay off, and with that he decided to play along with the man for now.

"Got one?" John asked in his best surprised facade, "One what?" He looked over his shoulder for Weaver, his companion in this time-traveling debacle, but was taken by actual surprise when he saw that she had vanished from the basement entirely.

_Guess I understand why he only thinks he caught 'one', _John thought as the man took another cautious step toward him.

John looked one more time over his shoulder to confirm Weavers absence before turning back to face the man in front of him, _Well great going. Haven't even been here two minutes and already I'm being held at gunpoint._ His mind searched for something to say to the man in front of him, anything that could help him out of this situation.

There had been a time after his uncle had nearly died in his home when he heard a few stories from him about his time spent in the future. John had never really given it much thought but Derek had always referred to Cameron as the 'metal' or another derogatory term coined from that phrase. Now might be the perfect time to try it out, especially if it got the man to lower his gun.

"Please, I'm not metal," he said rather convincingly, even throwing in a fake cowering stance to let the man feel as if he controlled the situation.

"Don't move!," the man ordered, still not lowering his weapon but John had seemed to have stopped his encroaching march forward.

_Damn, ok not a free thinker,_ John told himself as he threw in a wince to let the man continue to believe he held the upper hand. _Guess I'll have to convince his superior when he shows up._

"I said don't move!" The man snapped as John winced, his eyes narrowed and trained themselves on the center of John's chest as the hum of energy still continued to grow.

_Ok John, make it count,_ he told himself as he spoke to the man in a pleading tone, Please! I swear, I haven't got anything! I...I...I'm human!"

"Because I _will _blast you!" the man threatened as he continued bearing down on John with the large rifle.

Movement over the mans shoulder from the hole in the wall grabbed John's attention as another figure stepped through the haze and fog to stand by the cautious soldiers side. The frame on this figure was tall and well built, being very muscular all around, showing signs of someone who knew how to take care of themselves even in an apocalyptic wasteland. At first he reminded John of Uncle Bob from the way he carried himself but where Uncle Bob had been very muscular in his chest and arms, this man was an imposing figure of a different kind. He looked like he could kill you with a properly placed punch as well as a kick. He wasn't the top-heavy human tank that the T-800's were.

"Stand down," called the new figure, who stepped into the light and looked John over before patting the soldier on the back to let him know everything was under control.

The soldier in front of him lowered his weapon and the hum emitting from it slowly resided. He took an at ease stance next to the man, who was clearly his superior officer. A group of new soldiers appeared from the hole in the wall behind the two figures as John stood in shock from the sight of the SO standing in front of him.

_He's here...It's him..._ he had to remind himself to pickup his jaw from its slacked position but he couldn't help himself from saying out loud, "Derek?"

Men gathered to John's rear but he didn't pay them any attention as he lowered his noticeably trembling hands. He was no longer concerned with keeping up a false image in front of the soldiers, if it really was Derek standing in front of him John wouldn't have to.

_Derek too two steps forward with his arms tucked behind his back in a stance that John recognized as his 'studying' style. It was something he'd noticed about his uncle, especially from their time spent at the ROTC academy when looking after young military cadets. John picked up his sneaky side from Derek, the man liked to appear calm and relaxed as he watched your every move like a hawk._

_ His eyes bore down into John's studying everything about his face. There was something familiar about him, but at the moment he couldn't place him. One thing was obviously clear to Derek about the young man though and he called out to the troops to the boys back._

_ "Look in his eyes. He's got about as much metal in him as you do," Derek turned with a slight smirk on his face and addressed the first soldier who had been in the hallway._

_ John dry-swallowed air down his throat as he stood in front __of his uncle in awe, "Derek?"_

_ The man turned back to face John, studying him again. The kid knew him from somewhere and this feeling in his gut gave __suspicion that he knew the boy as well, but whenever he grasped at something in his mind he returned with nothing but air. _

_ "Yea?" he replied bluntly, hoping the boy was just confused from being stark naked in the middle of a freezing cold hallway with nothing but a trench-coat on._

"John...J...John Connor," John explained, hoping the name triggered a response from the otherwise stone-faced Derek.

Derek gave one final look over the 'Connor' person in front of him before stating very flatly, "I know a lot of people kid, I don't know you."

He decided to ease the tension in the air with a joke to calm down his comrades who were still visibly on-edge from the boys sudden appearance, "anyone ever heard of the name _John Connor?_" He chuckled out loud in jest as he turned to the men at his back.

Then men all shook their heads at Derek's question and waited for him to resolve the issue at hand. They watched as he turned back to John and gave a slight sigh, "Well...you know what? I think you're gonna be famous. My brothers back and you're wearing his coat."

Derek's eyes flew over John's shoulder as the crunching of small rubble under the soles of combat boots filled his ears. A rigid chill went down his spine as he exhaled and turned around nervously. John had seen his father only once before, and even then he had been no more then a child playing baseball with his older brother in a park. His mother had no pictures of him from his adulthood that he had ever seen before, only stories of their one night spent together.

A man who he assumed was Kyle came to a halt while eying John curiously. He bore a slight resemblance to John, both of them having a slim yet athletic build and a short stature. John inhaled slowly as the realization dawned on him that he was looking at his father for the first time in his life. He didn't know what to say...how to respond...

Kyle Reese eyed John with the same vague expression and curiosity that his older brother had. He didn't have the faintest clue as to who this shitstain who stole his coat was, but something about him was familiar...something he couldn't quite place.

John caught his breath after nearly tearing up at the sight of the man standing before him. He noticed movement over his father's shoulders of a teenage girl, who looked to be about his age, coming up to pet one of the German Shepards that the officers had leashed by their sides. Her face was in the shadows for the moment and he couldn't see who she was, but something about her was oddly familiar until she stepped into the light and he knew exactly who she was.

She was very graceful, even in an apocalyptic world, she carried herself with poise. The girl smiled as she leaned forward and took a knee to scratch the ears of the closest German Shepard. The animal whined in delight as she continued scratching. With a flick of her neck the long hair that had obscured her view of the boy in the tunnel moved out of her way and she caught a better look at him, just as perplexed about his arrival as everyone else seemed to be.

John was on the verge of a panic attack as her hair parted ways and he got a clear view of her face, _Cameron?...Its...Its really her._ He stared down at her in shock-and-awe until he regained control of his senses.

_The past carries into the future. If Derek doesn't know who I am then I never existed because I jumped time...which means there was no reason to create Cameron...or the T-800's...or the time machine... _The thoughts rushed through his mind all at once, causing his expression to fade and his shoulders to sag.

___This isn't Cameron, she never existed,__ his mind told himself as the dog continued its whining from the girl's scratching of its ears._

_ Kyle grew restless and shifted his gear to his other shoulder before asking his older brother, "Who is he Derek?" He threw up his arm and smacked John on the arm, causing him to stumble backwards by a few steps despite his fathers relative small size and muscle mass._

_ The fighters saw the small weakness in his armor and decided to poke fun at John further by snickering amongst __themselves before being given an icy stare-down from Derek. Everyone silenced themselves as his eyes fell over them, even the dogs stopped beckoning from the pleasure of the girl comforting them. The eyes in the hallway flirted between John and Derek, hovering on one for only a moment before darting back to linger on the other._

"I don't know, never seen him before. Thinks he knows me though, say's his names Connor, John Connor," Derek responded to his younger brother after he was satisfied with everyone else's silence.

Kyle turned his attention back to the scrawny boy in front of him again. Anyone in their right mind would know the kid posed no threat to anyone, even Allison could take him down if she had the proper purpose to do so. Yet even as he stood before the young man Kyle could tell that something was different about him then any others they had come across before, it was in the way he carried himself. All the other survivors would be cowering in fear or showering thanks for being discovered before they would be taken to the nearest resistance base and given safe shelter, but not this young man. He stood tall, even when hunched over, and something behind his eyes gave the impression of confidence even when or if the boy didn't see it in himself.

"Who the hell are you kid?" Kyle sniffed the air but didn't wait for a reply, "You ain't no tunnel rat. You AWOL? Or no, no maybe you're something worse. I think we got us a gray here boys."

The very last word of Kyle's speech set everyone in the room on edge again except for Derek who remained steadfast next to his younger brother. Every soldier in the hall noticeably tensed up and grabbed their weapons from their sides as Kyle mentioned the grays. Derek may have given the order for them to stand down but John saw something touch a nerve in them, something that would make them go above and beyond duty. Things like that were personal and would likely get him killed or would likely buy him some time to figure out what was going on, so on a bet with himself he decided to play the odds.

Feigning confusion by his father's question he returned with one of his own, "I'm not sure what that means." John inquired, "Is that a code or something? I don't see any gray on you guys."

"We ain't no metal-loving freaks," exclaimed the man who had been pointing his rifle at John a few moments before. His grip tightened on the rifles trigger as John heard the sounds of various safeties going off on all the soldiers weapons.

"Stand down," Derek said calmly, "Fucker's as much a gray as I am metal. All of you," he turned and motioned to the hole in the wall, "Get your asses back to base. I want a perimeter up before midnight."

Kyle took a step towards John as the soldiers behind him moved forward and began filing through the hole, "You have any idea how close you came to getting your head blown off? Who the fuck goes wandering around in the nude?"

John blinked for the first time in what felt like an eternity and answered his father, "No, no sir."

"Alright _John Connor_," said Derek mockingly, "you're gonna be in the rear. We can figure out what the hell to do with you when we get back to command."

"That," Kyle pointed at the coat covering John's body, "had better be spotless when its returned to me."

With a slap of the back and a suppressed laugh Derek turned and motioned for Kyle to head into the hole at the end of the hallway, leaving John standing by himself clutching at the coat that belonged to his father. A playful chuckled filled the air behind him, taking him by surprise. The young girl who had been tending to the dogs now stood by his side, the resemblance to Cameron was remarkable, they could almost pass as...twins.

"You might be the dumbest son-of-a-bitch we've ever found this far into the rabbit hole," she said, letting the leash in her hands go and letting the dogs trot ahead through the hole.

"At least I'm alive," John explained, speaking the first words to Cameron's twin.

The girl looked to be at ease in his presence almost as much as Derek had been. She stepped closer and scrunched her eyes at him, taking a deep sniff before standing back and letting him breath, "You smell funny...you smell clean, but burnt. Like you just got through firing off an entire cartridge of plasma into an endo."

"You'll have to excuse me," John coughed from the chill running through him, "I left my shampoo at home."

"Well you're going to be a handful aren't you," the girl burst out into laughter and bent over to pickup a pistol at her feet, "Names Allison, Allison Young."

"John..." he started to say before being cut off.  
"Save it, we all heard who you are," Allison waved the gun between his and her face, "You try anything while I'm watching you and this is going up your ass. Now come on, I'm hungry."

"I'll keep that under consideration," John gulped and fell into step behind her as they ducked into the hole in the wall and exited out into a large open area that had once been a subway station.

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I hope you all enjoy the rewrites!

There should be two new chapters every week until it is finished and I move onto Facing No Fate.

To Be Continued...


	2. Chapter 2

******Chapter 2: Up is Down, Down is Up**

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******December 3, 2009**

******ZeiraCorp Basement, LA  
5:12PM**

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"I love you,too," was all Sarah could manage to choke out in a hushed whisper as the bluish-purple sphere in front of her disappeared into nothingness. Such simple words for someone to say especially to their own child but what made Sarah cringe was the realization of knowing just how few times she had ever spoken them to him. The only times that stuck out in her mind had been just prior to or after a near-death experience, which spoke volumes to her psyche on her aptitude as a mother.

The mangled remains of the computer terminals sitting on racks in the room she stood in were twisted and burnt from electrical fire almost to the point of non-recognition to her. Cameron remained seated at the chair in front of the table, at least what was left of her, the head still carried that distant-gazing expression that gave Sarah the feeling that perhaps in her last moments the cyborg had experienced something akin to sadness.

The synthetic skin covering her neck and face had been mostly torn away from the multiple openings by bullet wounds and half of her face had been blasted off in the prison escape. Skin that remained clinging to her skull was badly burned almost to the point of resembling scorched meat while the blood oozing from her wounds had begun to boil and matriculate down to the floor below. Most of her clothing had burned away but her leather boots had melted from the intense heat cause by the time-displacement sphere and slithered down her arms and legs to join the boiling blood on the floor, forming a nauseating goop of red and blue tinged liquid. Small fires from the exposed electronic equipment behind her were starting to spread from the multiple sparks arching as the bare wires came into contact with one another.

"My God," breathed James Ellison to Sarah's right side, taking a step back from the gruesome scene of the nude and burned Cameron in front of him. "What the hell..."

"Something about a living organism generating a field of some kind," Sarah explained, swallowing a lump of bile running up her throat at the smell beginning to emanate from the dead skin and puddle of goop on the floor. "Nothing dead goes through," the words from Kyle's interview by Dr. Silberman repeated themselves with his voice inside her head as she explained them to Ellison, the image of John's father on the blurry VHS interrogation tape filling up her minds eye.

She knew the explanation she offered him wouldn't stop the images in his head that would undoubtedly follow, nor the nightmares. They still haunted her from the two nights spent in terror and seclusion while on the run for her life. Whenever she closed her eyes at night Sarah still saw the fire, it always started with the fire in her nightmares, then the chrome-skeleton would rise from the licking flames and chase her into oblivion until she awoke with a cold sweat.

"Take a good look at it," she let out a breath and sucked in more air through her mouth to keep from smelling the burnt flesh, "That is the future of humanity if we fail to stop Skynet."

Ellison stepped out into the hallway and grabbed Sarah by the arm, pulling her back with him, "We need to get this thing out of here."

"The hell are you talking about," Sarah shook off his touch and stared him down with venom dripping from her lips, "_Get it out of here_, we're going to destroy it."

Sarah made a quick and stirring decision that if Ellison was not on board for destroying the computer equipment that Catherine Weaver had owned then he needed to be removed from her path. She wasn't going to let the thing that had taken her son away from her survive another minute, especially since it was already limping to stay alive from the damage done to it by the time travel device. Her right hand slipped behind her back as she pushed Ellison against the hallway wall with her other hand and she withdrew the 9mm pistol that had been tucked away in the waistband of her pants. Ellison held up his hands as his eyes settled on the gun in front of him and silently began reciting a prayer to himself. At any moment he was expecting her to fire but instead he heard the static sound of electricity coupled with struggling sounds from Sarah as she hit the floor and convulsed at his feet.

"You can ah...thank me later," said Murch just a few feet away, holding the taser in both hands as the cords running from it continued to send shocks into Sarah's body on the floor.

"Turn if off," Ellison barked, staring at the usually sheepish Murch in disbelief. "Off!"

"Alright, alright," Murch jumped at the authoritative tone of Ellison's voice and he let go of the trigger on the device in his hands making Sarah stop shaking from having passed out. "Next time a psycho decides to blow your brains out I'll just let her."

"Shut up," Ellison stepped over Sarah's limp body and walked back into the AI room where he had spent many months of the past year teaching ZeiraCorp's pet project ethics and moral rules. "Get in here and help me figure out where to store this thing," he motioned to the computer equipment behind the table with Cameron's body seated at it.

"Store what?" Murch stepped into the doorway and let his eyes immediately go wild with the sight of the girls body with a chrome skull seated at the table a few feet in front of him. "There was another? No one mentioned that there was another...is it like him? I mean, is it like John Henry?"

"I don't know, anymore," Ellison replied, studying the singed equipment resting on the racks to the rear of the room. "Murch! Get your ass over here and help me move this stuff out."

"What for?" Murch asked curiously, walking forward towards the table to examine Cameron's body from a much better angle, "That is just the interface, John Henry is nothing more then software housed inside of a box; he is already locked up inside of the temperature-controlled server room along with the processors that he uses to function."

"You want to explain that in English?" Ellison flashed him a look of agitation as the man continued to ogle over the body of Cameron. "Today, preferably."

"Right," Murch said, snapping out of his fascination with the machine in front of him. He stood and explained the terms to Ellison again, "This is nothing more then what we call an interface. It is where we interact with John Henry, but it is not John Henry. Think of it like a laptop or a desktop computer, all the vital information is stored inside the tower, the interface is the keyboard and screen. You are essentially telling me to wheel the screen and keyboard of the computer out of here and lock it up so nobody else can touch it, it does not make sense to do that when we already have the tower locked up in a room down the hall."

"Why didn't you say that the first time?" Ellison asked, still agitated at the man for having problems with grasping the concept that not everyone around him understood technology on a level that he did.

"I assumed you knew," Murch replied before turning back to Cameron, "Now this on the other hand could be a gold-mine of information and technology, just like the other one was. This is something worth moving and locking up."

Ellison saw Sarah begin to stir on the floor and motioned for Murch to aid him in picking up Cameron's limp body, "Where can we go with this?"

"There is a hardware room inside of the server base where we store extra hard-disks and anything else John Henry would need, we can store it in there for now," Murch heaved the metal body up from the chair and started backing his way up to the door. "At least until I figure out how to fix it."

"Fix it," Ellison looked baffled as they stepped over Sarah on the floor and began making their way towards the server-farm where John Henry's processors were. "Why the hell do you want to fix it? John Henry is the..."

"He isn't here anymore, or at least not totally, that is what sent up the red-flag to me in the first place," Murch explained as he unlocked the door with his key-card and stepped into the server-room. "I was running a diagnostic on the AI because it was showing these frighteningly large spikes in power usage a few minutes ago and then boom, everything just leveled out to way under his normal operating levels."

"So the chip from this one has John Henry on it?" Ellison looked more and more confused as Murch opened the storage room door and they placed the infiltrator skeleton into the small compartmentalized room.

"Well no, not entirely. I'm thinking that he downloaded a part of himself and transferred it to that chip and whatever had been on the chip originally is now functioning as part of the AI core," Murch said as he locked the storage room door. "I don't know how much of John Henry was left behind but what we have is definitely not the entire core that we've been housing for the past year, and I don't know how much of that other entity has integrated itself with his other systems."

"You mean Cameron? The girl?" asked Ellison, slowly beginning to wrap his head around all of the tech information that Murch was spewing out.

"Yea, her. Wait, she has a name?" Murch looked just as confused as Ellison had a few moments before until he pushed the trivial question from his mind and continued with his explanation, "She was communicating to us through the interface in the interface-room when I walked in, or did you not see the sprawling line of text keep repeating itself? If she is able to communicate with us then she is inside his systems."

"Yea," Ellison sighed as they stepped back into the hall while Murch secured the server-room door behind them, "that I did see."

A few feet away from them stirred a restless Sarah as she blinked her eyes furiously to try and clear the fog hovering over her mind. She had felt the sting of electricity surging through her body before and just repeated the moves of clenching her fists and blinking heavily to help speed up the time it would take for the effects to wear off. Sarah made a move to stand by propping herself up onto her bad left arm which caused her shoulder to give and she fell back down onto the hard cold floor. It was a sore reminder of the injuries that plagued her body during her war with Skynet. The one that caused her to loose some function in the left arm and shoulder had been caused by the T-1000 sending a metallic spike through her rotor-cuff, which had never fully healed since she had never sought proper medical treatment for the wound.

Sarah forced herself to push through the pain and she stood up on her feet to see Cameron's body missing from the table where she could see sill the banner of "I'm Sorry John..." scrolling across the LED screens that continued to function. The first thought that shot through her mind was surprisingly a revelation that Cameron understood the phrase sorry. After that sobering thought wore off it was replaced with absolute rage at the two men standing a few feet away from her down the hall.

"Where is it?" Sarah snapped, she picked her gun up and aimed it at the two men in the hall. "Where did she go?"

"She isn't working," Murch spat out, throwing his hands up above his head instantly when he saw the gun. "B..but we can fix her, if that is what you want..."

"Sarah these people are not your enemy!" Ellison yelled to break Sarah's steel concentration she had on Murch. "They've...we've been working together to try and prevent the apocalypse, not hasten it. Think back to a few minutes ago, would Weaver really try and save us in her office from that blast if she was a threat to you or your son in any way? Come on Sarah, just put down the gun and we can talk about this."

The sounds of muffled sirens from above caught Sarah's attention and she lowered the gun slightly, "I will be back for that thing, and for her, and my son. If you're in my way when I get back then I am going to be mowing you down, do you understand?"

"There's an exit just down the hall to the parking garage, if you want to come I can help you get out of here," Ellison nodded and held his hand out for Sarah to take, she brushed by him with a roll of her hard eyes and walked towards the corner where he had pointed.

"You coming?" Ellison asked Murch before turning and following Sarah.

"No, nah I'm gonna stay here and try and get that body up and running again," Murch looked at Ellison nervously as Sarah halted, still keeping the gun in her hands as she held the door open for him.

"Come on," she snapped impatiently.

"Good luck," Ellison called out to Murch as he jogged towards the door that Sarah had now passed through, "I'll be back in a few hours."

* * *

******December 3, 2009  
ZeiraCorp Parking Structure  
5:23PM**

* * *

The emergency personnel were beginning to congregate outside the base of the ZeiraCorp office building as the firefighters were still making their way up to the top floor to battle the flames that were spreading from the hover-drone explosion and crash landing. Ellison gave a hesitant look over to the security guard station where the gate was closed preventing their exit, but Sarah continued jogging forward until she realized that any one of the black company cars could be his.

"Hey!" she shouted, "You still trying to get out of here, or are you thinking of calling them over here to arrest me again?"

"I told you, that wasn't me," Ellison turned his gaze back to Sarah and thumbed the button on his key-chain to unlock the car.

"Save it until we're out of this shit," Sarah spat out her words with a tone laced in sarcasm and sheer threatening menace that only she could.

Ellison took his seat next to her and fastened his seat belt before starting the car and pulling out of the small parking space and heading towards the security gate. "Play this cool," he said to Sarah, who was busy trying to straighten herself and wipe the blood from the small cuts on her forehead away.

"Good evening Mr..." the security guard stopped talking and let his mouth drop open in shock when he saw the disheveled woman and the shook-up James Ellison seated next to her.

"Carl, right," Ellison said, breaking the silence between them. "Listen, we need to get out of here before things get, a little too complicated." His eyes flew over Carl's shoulders to the growing crowd of police vehicles, ambulances, and firetrucks that were parked in front of the entrance to the building.

"Now, Mr. Ellison, you know I can't do that. I need permission from the LAPD before I can let anyone out of the premises," Carl said, taking a step back into the small cubicle that was his office and putting his thumb over the silent alarm just in case it was needed.

"Mrs. Weaver, she asked me to go and pickup her daughter from dance practice," Ellison countered, noting the man's usual movement with his hand and thinking that he had already set off the silent alarm. "I'm running this one by the hospital on the way there, she's got a pretty bad concussion doesn't know what is what."

Carl looked up to see the police cruisers in the reflection of the glass separating him from Ellison's car and looked back down at the two passengers, "Why not drop her off with them?"

"They're going to stay and setup a perimeter, she probably wouldn't get to the hospital until midnight with the magnitude of injured people in there," Ellison replied. "I'd rather drive her there myself and be done with it."

"Ok," Carl said reluctantly, "Be safe out there, Mr. Ellison."

"You too, Carl," Ellison smiled and slowly pulled out onto the road as the crossing gate rose to allow them passage out of the parking garage.

* * *

Hope you all enjoy the rewrites :D

To Be Continued...


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three: ****Pico De Gallo**

* * *

**December, 2027**

**Exterior Zeiracorp Basement**

**Los Angeles, California**

**12:00 Am**

* * *

A spider HK patrol-unit continued its walk down the once thriving business district of the city of angels. The main body was supported by six large legs which made loud metallic thuds as it progressed down the street scanning for signs of human life and other signs that might present themselves as anything out of the ordinary. Another chunk of asphalt cracked under the weight of the metallic spider as it crossed an intersection of the once busy office complexes and it began scanning positive signs of human life, but it corrected the parameters of its search to exclude deceased persons.

Skull after skull began showing up in the littered rubble and mangled remains of vehicles that were scattered across the road while the HK assessed the situation and began carefully determining the best possible route through the concrete jungle. The unit had been built for extreme mobility when compared to other units like the Aerial HK's or the many variations of Skynet's ground-tank units, but it still had to take precautions when traveling through broken sections of concrete. The smallest shift in weight in some areas could topple the ground out from under itself or bring a building down which would render it useless.

The scanners were almost through with surveying the wreckage in front of it when a partial piece of debris threw up a red flag across its HUD. A large piece of steel, bent and twisted but with scorch marks blasted across its face stood out from everything else in the vicinity like a sore thumb. Everything else in the street was either a former piece of building debris, human remains, or neatly parked cars along a full street that remained from the rush hour traffic from when the bombs fell from the sky, but this piece of metal was neither from here nor belonged in this region.

**Scanning...**

**Dimensions: 1.5m x 1.2m x 1cm**

**Indications of Plasma fire...**

**Possible refuge entrance for resistance movement.**

**Calculating appropriate actions...standby...**

**Threat level mid-tier, Switching to thermal-vision**

The scanner showed signs of a large mound huddled under the piece of steel, possibly the size of two humans that had either recently perished or were shielding themselves from the frigid temperatures outside. After passing the twenty meters through the rubble to come closer to the questionable piece of metal it brought one of its thick legs up and tossed the piece of metal to the side like it was made of cloth.

One hundred yards behind the HK unit in the cover of a second story building formerly identified as ZeiraCorp, a human gave a hand signal to signify that the HK was in the hot-zone. His comrade across the street nodded and hit the switch on his detonator sending electric signals down through the wires at his feet and to the package of explosives sitting under the HK unit, blowing it into hundreds of pieces that danced through the sky and came crashing down into the street in front of them.

The soldier confirmed to his partner across the street that the spider HK had bitten the dust before disconnecting the cords from his demo trigger and tucking it away inside his pack. He jogged down the partially dilapidated staircase of the office building and across the rubble covering the street to rendezvous with his partner who watched him breeze through the debris with his long overcoat flowing in the wind behind him.

"We'll aren't we majestic," came his partners voice through her thick layers of cloth covering the lower portions of her face.

"Quiet," huffed the man as he slid down into the trench next to her. "Thought I heard something back there..."

The distinct whine of an Aerial HK came from the southwest until the hulking machine flew into view, hovering over the street in front of them to study the carnage of its fallen comrade. With a motion of his hand for her to be quiet, the man withdrew his demo pack and hit a switch on the side of it causing the ground to rumble from an explosion three blocks to the north of them. A building collapsed where the vibrations were emanating from and the Aerial drone flew off into the distance to observe this new development.

"Thank you, C4," the girl pulled her mask of rags off and flashed a smile to the man as she gave him a smack on the back. "Kick ass, Bedell!"

"Yea?" Bedell said through his mask. "Pretty sure if your eyes and ears would have been focused on something other then my ass flying across the pavement that you would have heard that thing coming from a mile away."

"Yea," the girl sighed and looked disappointed before looking up at him with a smirk again, "But it is such a nice ass."

"Alright Marie, pack up and lets boogie," Bedell smirked. He slung his pack over his shoulder and sniffed the cold air before sliding the mask back up over his face.

"Ya' know, when you said you had a future planned out for us, I didn't think it precluded blowing shit up in the middle of the night while hiding from machines," Marie said with a laugh as she stood and hefted her own pack up onto her shoulders.

"_Oh hey there, Marie. Oh by the way, the world is going to end soon and I think you need to come hide with me and a bunch of my friends in holes while we..._" she mocked him until he held up his hand when they came to a large pile of rocks covering the entrance to the ZeiraCorp basement system.

"Bedell, Bn-4148, Det-com. Sol, Bn-9849, Det-com," Bedell began rattling off the info that identified him and his partner to everyone inside the complex until they heard a confirmation reply though the rocks. "Alright, let em' in."

Bedell hefted his pack again and began crawling through the gaps in between the rocks on his hands and knees with Marie on his six. When he reached the base of what had once been an elevator shaft Bedell stood on his feet and helped Marie by taking the pack from her shoulders to ease her passage through the last bit of rock. They were standing in a large cleared out area where the rest of their squad was with Derek Reese hovering over a map that was splayed out on top of a large flat rock while others were grouped around him offering information on the terrain.

Everyone welcomed the two returning soldiers back with silent nods as they made their way into the room and passed beside the German shepherds. Marie walked to the other end of the room and entered a small makeshift home made out of a few large pieces of rock sitting in a position that provided just enough room for two people to lay under them for privacy. Bedell watched her crawl under the rocks that constituted his and her home and tried to move past the fact that they were living in the present-day equivalent of a cardboard box, he saw Derek motion for him to come join him and began making his way over to his superior officer.

"Report," asked Derek as he looked down from Bedell to the map again and ran his eyes over it for the tenth time.

Bedell removed his scarf and goggles before looking over the map and pointing to the area where he had detonated the charge for the spider HK, "Found a spider bot here, mirror-bait got it taken care of but it called in the attention of one of the choppers."

His finger hovered to the area where the building collapsed from the pressure of the blast he had sent through the air, "Had to blast the northern det-center to call it away. Other then that we didn't run into anything out there, sir. Damn quiet night."

"Well its not going to be quiet anymore" Derek replied in a sullen tone. He took a swig of his water and looked back at the younger soldier by his side, "Damn near everything in a ten mile radius heard that blast you made, come daylight we're gonna be crawling with Skynet."

"Well it was a choice between giving away our position now, or buying everyone enough time to escape and fall-back to base, sir," Bedell stated calmly, falling into attention when Derek stood up straight and looked him straight in the eye.

"I know," Derek said. He seemed to be looking through Bedell when he spoke, his eyes never lingering in one place for more then a moment as they bounced around the room to the others that lay scattered in their groups of warmth. "Get a good nights sleep, Bedell. We're going to be pulling out of here in the morning."

"Back to command, sir?" Bedell asked, looking genuinely surprised at the possibility of returning back to the safety of the central command post.

Derek nodded twice then dismissed Bedell as he hunched back over the map sprawled out across the large piece of rock and began planning their route for the morning. It would be a long and slow journey with a group their size, even though they didn't carry any civilians with them for safe-keeping, staying out of the eyes of Skynet during the night could be done but doing it in daylight was nearly impossible. Bedell walked over to the soup kitchen where Cindy had been boiling up five-day old ingredients into something worth eating and grabbed two portions, one for himself and one for Marie.

"True we heading out of here in first light?" Cindy asked when pouring the soup into two cups for him.

"Yea," he replied and took the two hot cups of soup from her hungrily. Once he pushed his nose out of the smell rising up from the cups he felt the sudden urge to down every bit of the hot soup immediately, but he restrained himself.

"Well its gonna be damn interesting," Cindy said, pointing her soup spoon over to Allison Young who was cuddled up in the dark corner of the room with a civilian.

"Whats with the runt? Some tunnel rat that can barely stand and drool?" Bedell sneered as his sullen eyes looked over Allison who was eating her soup with her body tucked under a home-sewn blanket while the civilian seemed to be coping with nothing more then an overcoat.

"Dunno, patrol came back about an hour ago with him in tow. All I know is they found him butt-ass naked in one of the tunnels back there," Cindy rolled her eyes and went back to tending to the soup in the large pot in front of her while Bedell kept looking at the young man, something about him was oddly familiar.

"Great, more baggage we don't need," he sniffed at the cold air inside the basement and got another strong scent of his soup.

"Martin...Martin!" Marie beckoned by poking her head out from her hole under their pile of rocks, "Hurry up, I'm starving."

"Right," his attention was snapped away from the young man seated next to Allison and brought back to his wife and his stomach which were both practically screaming for food. "Thanks for this, Cindy."

"Alright now," Cindy smiled while she stirred the soup again, "Better watch out, Marie. I just might steal his polite ass away from you."

John watched from the corner of the room as Martin Bedell walked over to the hulk of rocks and crawled under them to his wife and sipped on his soup quietly while Allison continued to study him from under the safety of her blanket. She didn't seem too concerned with his being there with them at the moment nor did anyone else for that matter. John guessed that if you could get past the German Shepard guards then you were safe in their book, and it wasn't like they would have much to converse or socialize about after having been in a war for nearly twenty years.

The aspect that intrigued John the most about being in the company of everyone around him was the fact that he seemed to be the only civilian in the entire group. Everyone else in the basement complex was dressed in military clothing and were carrying weapons that were foreign to him, ranging in both size and shape. After being told stories of the future by Cameron he had always assumed that small hot spots like this would be teaming with people that were not in the military, but then again those had been stories from a future where he was some godlike General, these people in front of him didn't even know who he was.

"Allison?" He asked after taking another swallow from his cup and letting the warmth radiate through his chest.

"Yea?" she replied with a low tone, her voice was full of stress and longing for sleep. Allison peeped her head out from under the blanket to look at him though her eyes were struggling to stay open from the long days work she had down scouring the tunnels.

"Does this happen often?" asked John as he forced himself to take another sip of the horrible soup. "Picking up stragglers I mean."

"Less often than we would like," came her faint voice in reply. She could see he was interested in talking more and probably wouldn't let the issue drop so she sat up against the hard wall and continued her explanation, "At first we would find people all the time out in the ruins, that is how they found me when I was little. But soon the numbers started dropping, slowly at first until there were days where we stopped finding people. One day would turn into two which then turned into a week, and...well you get the idea. Can't I just get some sleep, please?"

"Sorry," he apologized sympathetically. "I didn't mean to pry."

John watched her eyes slowly close and made a move to cross his legs to give her enough room to lay down and stretch out in the space in front of them. With the swiftness that he didn't think possible coming from someone of her size she pulled the blanket closer to herself and threw part of it aside to let him see the large pistol she held in her right hand, "If you go trying to make a move on me you're going to be eating lead from this barrel instead of what you'd like to be eating, understand?"

"I was...uh...I was just trying to give you some room to lay down," John said, keeping his eyes locked on hers and intentionally avoided looking at the pistol in her hand.

"I bet you were," she said, throwing the cover back over her arm and legs and snuggling up against the wall again. "I'd prefer to just go to sleep if you don't mind."

John could see the frustration in her eyes from the lack of sleep but something else lay underneath the distant look in her eyes, something had happened in the past to her but he wasn't sure what it was. Whatever it was had been enough to make her uncomfortable around him, even though she hid it well in her exterior.

"I meant no offense...good night," John said. He sat his cup down next to him and stretched out in the space he had made for her.

Allison brushed her hair aside and looked at him strangely for a moment as he nodded off. She didn't remember meeting many people like him before, not that they met many new people this far into the war, but there was something about him that was odd. The way he carried himself and his mannerisms were unlike anyone she had met since before the war had started, it was refreshing but still very strange behavior and out of place.

_Ignorance must be one hell of a bliss_, she thought as she pulled the blanket back up over her head and dozed off to sleep against the cold wall.

* * *

To Be Continued On Friday...


	4. Chapter 4

******Chapter 4: ********Restless Activity**

* * *

******December, 2027  
ZeiraCorp Basement – D Section  
6:08 AM**

* * *

John considered himself an oddity in the scene of growing up in the angst-ridden path of adolescence for many reasons. The most frequent one was the constant running from machines to live until tomorrows sun rose above the horizon. Out of everyone in the world he was also probably one out of maybe only ten in all of humanity that had traveled through time not only once but twice. And for the majority of his life he had been raised in a belief from his mother that hewas _the only hope for mankind_.

It was nearly morning or at least it felt like it should be, he wasn't entirely sure since the self-coined term _Time-Lag_ was something we was currently suffering from, but he had been awake before anyone else in his immediate surroundings. Even the soldiers that had spent practically their entire lives fighting Skynet forces were still fast asleep in the dark and cold basement of the ZeiraCorp building. John clutched at the jacket coat again to help himself warm up a little from the frighteningly cold air in the room.

The jacket did little to help but it was at least something to shield himself from the elements. John looked over at Allison who looked quite comfortable laying underneath the thick blanket that was wrapped around her body.

_Figures that I would be the ugly-duckling but this is ridiculous, _John thought, his teeth started knocking against themselves again. _Suck it up, John. There is nothing else in the room to use at all, they aren't intentionally being assholes. No, they're only accidentally and unfortunately being assholes..._

John put his right hand to his face and pinched his nostrils together in the hopes of muffling or stopping the sensation of needing to sneeze. The tickling feeling slowly subsided and he was able to lower his hand and breath again, because if anyone was woken up from a loud sneeze by the newcomer he didn't know how long he would be on the bottom of the totem-pole or worse.

His mother had trained him from an early age to blend in with others and to disappear without a trace if need be and right now he needed to do the former with speed and grace. For years she had honed him down from a rough edged boy to a teenager with the surface as smooth as marble in hopes that he'd be ready to take over one day. To John though it never felt like he would ever be ready to lead people anywhere, let alone fight a war.

All of the training in the world didn't seem like it would ever be enough to amount for anything when he thought about putting himself in the shoes of who he had been prophesied to be. Even though he didn't mind being around people at all and in fact enjoyed being in their company he always felt like he would and should be the last person in charge of anything. He had seized the chance a few times in the past and things had varied in their results from downright horrific to excellent, but that wasn't good enough for him. If he was going to be in charge he needed to be reassured that excellence would happen more-often then the other option, because getting people killed was probably the worst thing that he would ever want resting on his conscience. For that reason he had always tried to blend in with people rather then standing out and embracing the leader role that his mother had always pushed him into.

John was particularly keen to blend in with everyone else at the moment, not only had half of the people in the room tried to kill him last night, but he was pretty sure that a good majority of them still harbored the mentality that he was a threat to them. Only Derek Reese seemed to think that he was worth keeping around until they figured out what to do with him.

The events of the previous night replayed themselves in John's mind and he winced when the images of people raising their weapons at him filled his vision. He supposed that things could have been worse, he could have been killed, but he was not desperate to repeat those events anytime soon.

"John, you aren't supposed to think like that." Cameron's voice echoed in his mind. He thought back to when he had heard her tell him that just after his birthday.

"Yea?" John had said, taking a step closer and standing no more then an inch from Cameron's face, "Why are you so sure?"

"You put someone else above yourself, you are not supposed to do that," Cameron said in her monotone accent, she reached up to the large gash on her cheek that she had stapled shut and ran her fingers over the cut.

"I thought I was supposed to do that," he answered her sarcastically, "Isn't that what this is all supposed to be about, learning how to be a leader? I thought leaders put everyone else above themselves?"

"They do," Cameron said with a smirk, "I just thought you needed reminding that it is okay to do that, even though it was an unwise decision." She walked by him and exited the front door of the room they had been standing in, giving him a wink as she closed the door behind her.

John listened to her talking to him again in his mind while he ignored the cold air nipping at his skin. She always had a knack for saying both the most inappropriate things and the most thought-provoking at the same time and that time had been no different. Given the fact that she had just tried to assassinate his mother and himself, he knew what everyone else reactions were when he said that he wanted to keep her alive and he had chosen to go against their will because of a gut instinct.

_Put everyone else above yourself and trust your instincts,_ Cameron's voice explained in his head while he smiled to himself.

Allison stirred next to him from the sound of her stomach wrenching itself from hunger. The contorted sounds coming from her were enough to bring him from his reminiscent thoughts and focus on his surroundings again. Everyone else in the basement was still asleep and a small fire that had been burning the night before now gave off a small whiff of smoke as the embers were still fading.

"Could you be any louder?" Allison asked her stomach with a silent yawn. She wiped her eyes groggily and sat up to see John laying down next to her and opened her eyes wide in surprise, "Oh, I thought that was a dream..."

"No," John smirked. "I'm quite real."

Without another word Allison stood and walked across the still dark room and ducked down to pass through the circular hole in the far-side wall. She disappeared from his view and John stood to follow her after she did not return in a couple of minutes. He stood up after going through the hole in the wall but didn't see her standing in the hallway in front of him, but he did hear a few pieces of rubble shifting and small pebbles of rock were falling down from the disjointed ceiling up above.

With a heft and a pullup he managed to drag himself up from the floor and into the maze of what had once been the ZeiraCorp building. Though he expected the entire building to be collapsed from what he had seen of the basement, most of it was surprisingly intact given the state of the world around them. There were corpses in what remained of the office cubicles as he made his way through the dark halls and stairs of the building before finding Allison leaning against an open window on the top floor.

Though he still knew that she was not Cameron, John still had to marvel at the similarities between the girl standing in front of him and the person that he knew. She was a few inches taller then Cameron had been, probably due to human growth but everything else was a spot on match. Her long and flowing brunette hair was blowing slightly in the cool night breeze as he made his way over the last pieces of rubble and stood next to her at the open window.

"Damn, thought I had lost you," she remarked and looked at him with a slight look of disdain before returning her attention to the remains of the city in front of her.

The eyes that looked over him were brown and hostile, though he was surprisingly used to seeing a forceful tone when they had looked at him in the past. Remembering their last meeting when he stood next to the window, John wished he had said something else rather then jumping into the elevator and heading up to see Catherine Weaver with his mother and James Ellison. _I took her for granted..._

"Is it morning?" John asked, he scanned the still bluish-purple dark sky for signs of light from the sun but failed to see any.

"Technically, yes," Allison replied, still not looking at him. "The destruction and everything sends up these clouds in the sky and it takes a long time for the sun to get through. Normally we get five or six hours of daylight on a good day."

"What about the other days?" John asked, leaning against the sill next to her and looking out over the destroyed city.

"What you see is what you get," Allison said flatly, she nervously shifted her weight onto her right foot and brushed her hair from her face with a gesture of her hand, "Look don't you have somewhere else to be?"

"Actually...no" John said with a slight chuckle. Movement off in the distance called his attention out through the dark haze of the morning. Gazing absently over the chaos and crumbling building in front of him, it took him a few seconds before he realized just what it was that was moving around.

At first it looked like a wasp from the silhouette that John could make out but it was far too large to be a common wasp; it was a large metallic structure with two beams of white light streaming down from its head and swiveling rotor engines that were mounted to each wing. John stood very still next to Allison as he slowly realized it was a machine that was flying a few blocks away from them along with multiple large tank-looking things on the ground.

"They a normal morning welcome?" John asked once he found his voice again, he had never imagined that Skynet would build something this massive just to hunt down humans.

"We've never had a patrolling party this close to us before, not in a long time," Allison answered vaguely. Her eyes were resting on the machines down a few blocks in front of them as if they were a common-place thing and she had seen them millions of times before.

Through the window John watched the machines scouring a scorched piece of Earth for something, small ant-like pieces of metal were gleaming up at them even at the large distance the machines currently were. John never imagined that they were capable of such precision and coordination, all of his life he had only seen them work on solo-missions. He watched as a blast from one of the aerial units sent a dilapidated wall toppling over and the small ant-like machines seemed to swarm the area while the tanks and aerial unit held their positions in case covering fire was needed.

"They do this every time we give them a distraction to hunt down," Allison spoke, breaking the silence between them. "We will detonate something and within a few minutes its crawling with metal, they usually don't give up that location for a solid week after we hit it."

Allison reached over with a piece of chalk and marked a notch on the wall before looking back out at the scouting party. He could barely make out the marks on the wall but John assumed they were a system she had developed to tell which location they had left or how many areas they had destroyed for a distraction, from what he could see there were well over a hundred little scratches on the wall.

A small red light grew brighter beside the window where it was mounted on the wall, it looked like a dismembered endoskeleton eye-socket that had been stuffed into a hole in the wall with a cord running down from it for a power source.

"That a good thing?" John asked, tapping Allison on the shoulder and motioning to the light which was growing brighter.

"No," Allison said in reply and grabbed the radio on her hip. She was just about to thumb down the alert with the radio before the light dimmed and went dark all together, causing Allison to let out a sigh of relief. "They get in the borders sometimes, that is a two block warning."

"Smart thinking," John nodded.

"Learned it from spending some time in the French section. Got sent over there right after all this happened with like half of all the other runts for training, that was one of the first things they taught us to do. I guess the lesson was lost on some," she eyed him curiously.

"Oh," John shrugged absentmindedly, "I must have forgot."

"_You forgot_?" Allison asked, dumbstruck by his casual stance with having forgotten that vital piece of survival knowledge. "How they hell have you stayed alive for this long if you can't even remember how to string up a perimeter device?"

"Yea...wait did you say the French sector?" John cut himself off as he spat out his second question with fervor.

"Okay there is no way in hell that you're Resistance if you don't know about the French sector, they're the..." Allison stopped herself mid-sentence, _What if he's trying to find out where Central Command is..._

In a split second her hand had snatched the pistol from her side-holster and pointed it at his chest, "Start talking, who the fuck are you? Lie and I'll end you."

"Wow, whoa whoa whoa whoa! Calm down alright?" John held up his hands, "I'm not from around here is all."

"That is very apparent," Allison scoffed and took a step towards him. "Still doesn't explain how you don't know anything that you should, like the basics of survival, and how you just appeared out of thin air in the rubble after we had already swept that area. Now START TALKING!"

"You aren't going to believe me so why don't you lower the gun and just let me go," John retorted, he let his arms fall to his side to emphasis that he was through with being on the defensive. "You can let me just slip out of here and I'll be on my way. I didn't come here to be shot by you okay? I'm just looking for someone..."

"Who is this person you're looking for then?" Allison snapped. "It sounds like you're trying to get information then slip out and give the metal our position."

"I'm not from around here," John repeated. "You aren't going to understand anything even if I told you the.."

"Oh my God," something clicked in Allison's mind and John could see it on her face that whatever it was was something that was about to change everything. "You're one of the times aren't you?"

"I'm...wait, what?" John asked, surprised by her question. "What is a times?"

"There have been rumors of them using a secret weapon from the metal to send people over but why the hell would they send a fish out of water like you?" Allison returned her pistol to her side-holster and looked John deep in the eyes, "You got sent across time didn't you? You're from the future, why the hell else don't you know how to survive... We've probably crushed the metal to bits where you're from. How did we do it, are we close to the end?"

"I'm not from the future," John said, taking a hesitant step back from her.

"What do you mean?" Allison looked surprised. "The rumors have all been about times being sent back to help us win the war."

"I'm not from around here," John said slowly. "But I'm glad to see that you guys know about time-travel."

"Well its never been confirmed," Allison explained. "Everyone refuses to talk about it when word of a times rises in a certain sector. I think that they don't want to let word get out to the greys about time-travel in case they leak that information to the metal, God-only-knows what they would do with time-travel."

"Yea," John let the words fade from his lips, "God-only-knows."

"So if you're not from the future..."

"I'm from way back," John finished her sentence for her. "I came through to find someone."

"Oh," Allison looked defeated and turned to look out the window again.

John looked up at the sky and saw the sun's rays beginning to penetrate the thick layers of blue and purple clouds that peppered the sky. _It must be some time around mid-day._

Allison noted this too and marked another notch on the wall with her piece of chalk before turning and making her way back to the hole in the floor that served as a staircase through the building, "My watch is over, we better get back."

"What is that for?" John asked, motioning towards the notches on the wall.

"Days in the year," she said. "Today's Christmas, merry Christmas."

"Yea," John said faintly, turning and looking at the machines still flying in the distance, "Merry Christmas."

* * *

To Be Continued...


	5. Chapter 5

******Chapter 5: ********Different Methods**

* * *

******December 3, 2009  
ZeiraCorp Basement  
6:08 PM**

* * *

Ellison pulled into the Apache Hotel parking lot like he had done the previous night to visit John, only this time he was returning a Connor to the residence instead of trying to take one away. Sarah remained seated in the passenger seat and was silent to the point of being considered almost dead. Ellison had spent most of the time driving filling his mind with thoughts of what had transpired that day and what was going to happen in the future.

"Are we there yet?" piped a small but high pitched voice in the backseat belonging to Savannah Weaver.

"Almost, we just have to drop off Miss. Connor," Ellison looked at the small red-haired girl in the rear-view mirror as the car came to a stop and he undid his seat-belt.

"Thanks for the ride," Sarah muttered under her breath and exited the car in a rush.

Ellison frowned and looked back to Savannah again, "Stay here for two minutes while I make sure Miss. Connor is okay, alright?"

"Can we go see John Henry after, please?" Savannah asked innocently, twirling the locks of hair in-between her fingers.

"We'll see," Ellison replied, and exited the car.

He jogged up to Sarah's side, who stood waiting in front of the hotel lobby while a heavy-set man was in the process of booking her room. Sarah didn't acknowledge that he had even exited the car and kept her eyes focused solely on the man in front of her. Ellison was just about to speak when a news bulletin caught his eye, "Can you turn that up please?"

"Sure..." the man said absentmindedly and thumbed the volume control on his remote to turn the TV up.

"... Not much is known at the moment Susan but early reports from witnesses seem to confirm that some form of drone crashed into the building on the corners of Romaine and Bellvue. First responders were on the scene in a matter of minutes and most of the staff in the building are reported as okay. No word yet on if anyone was injured or killed in this horrific ..."

"Goddamn psychopaths," the man from behind the counter said as he turned the television back down. "They ought to screen those idiots that go through a pilots license better. We don't need another nine-eleven on our hands."

Sarah remained quiet but Ellison chose this moment to speak, "I think you're confused."

"Come again," the man asked in disbelief, and obviously annoyed at Ellison.

"The thing that crashed into the building...news said it was a drone, that makes it unmanned. You can't screen a computer for psychopathic tendencies," Ellison said calmly.

"Well the gamer with the joystick needs to be put on trial then," the man spat out sarcastically and handed Sarah her key-card for the room, "Here you go, enjoy your stay miss. Can I help you?"

"Oh, no thank-you. I'm just seeing her to her room," Ellison explained, opening the door for Sarah to walk out of the lobby.

"Keep the mess to a minimum will you? I just got through cleaning up another couples dirty laundry," the man said absentmindedly and went back to watching the news coverage on the television set.

"Uh, right. Have a good day," Ellison said, baffled at the mans blunt way of speaking.

Sarah, who had been undeterred by the mans brash talk, already made her way across the parking lot and began climbing the stairs to where her room lay on the second floor.

"Wait up!" Ellison half-yelled as he jogged up behind her on the stairs.

"You ready to talk about destroying the bits of Skynet you have in the basement?" Sarah asked, sticking her key-card into the slot on the door-handle and opening the door, leaving it slightly ajar.

"Sarah, it isn't..."

"Then I'm done talking, thanks again for the ride," Sarah slammed the door in Ellison's face and slid down against it until she reached the floor. _I lost him...I lost him..._

Ellison could hear the muffled sobs coming through the door and was about to knock again before a cry from Savannah called his attention down to the parking lot, "Mr. Ellison, mommies on the news. Why does it say shes dead?"

"I'll be right there, Savannah," Ellison called down to her. He turned and looked at the door one final time before departing back down the stairs and over to the waiting car in the lot.

Back in the hotel room Sarah stood up and took a deep breath to fight back the tears and watched Ellison stride over to the car with the small girl in the back of it and take off down the road. _I guess now is a good a time as any if he's distracted..._

* * *

**Zeiracorp Basement Complex**

**Los Angeles, California**

**6:30 PM**

* * *

Murch had been working diligently for the past hour to try and get the skull base-plate open on the female endoskeleton so that he could attach the proper cables for the interface. Most of the time he had spent slaving away at the other endo had proven useful with this newer model, even though it differed in design to the previous one Zeiracorp had in its possession. With one final pry he finally got the base-plate to open and peered inside to see a complex system of wires, small motherboards, fans, and heat-sinks.

"One slight pull here," Murch said to himself and pried against one of the small motherboards. It snapped free quite easily with the pair of pliers in his hands and he removed it from the skull to take the wires that were connected to it off.

He reached over and picked up one of the extra sockets laying on the workbench then snapped it into place in the back of the skull where the motherboard had been. Murch then plugged in the cable running from one of the computer terminals that he had set up and watched the inanimate body in front of him come to life.

"Amazing," Much said to himself.

"Good evening Mr. Murch," came the familiar high baritone voice of John Henry from the female body.

"Good to see your still in here," Murch said, taking his eyes off of the damaged body in front of him and starting to put his tools away.

"I am in a diminished capacity," John Henry acknowledged. His voice made a sudden shift up into a higher register when he spoke next, "John?"

Murch spun around quickly to look at the body seated at the computer terminal in front of him but instead he found himself looking at a vengeful Sarah Connor who was brandishing a gun pointed straight at him, "You people can never help yourself can you? You can never just let things be, you always have to experiment..."

"Sarah?" Cameron's head looked up to the newcomer in the room. "Sarah where is John?"

"Don't pretend like you don't know, you planned this! Because of you I lost him, I lost my son!" Sarah turned the gun from the pudgy Murch down to the damaged endoskeleton and fired a round into the chest-plate for self-satisfaction. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't tear you apart piece by piece!"

Cameron didn't flinch but continued looking at Sarah, "He followed John Henry through?" Her voice was suddenly full of sadness or the machine equivalent of it.

"Like you don't already know..." Sarah snapped, taking a step towards Murch and motioning for him to get the hell out of the room.

Just as he was about to step outside Sarah brought the hilt of the pistol up and connected it hard with the back of his head, knocking him unconscious. She dragged his body back into the room and locked the door, "Can't have anyone interrupting our little reunion, now spill it; where is John?"

"I don't think you will understand," Cameron admitted, looking up at Sarah again sympathetically.

"Make me understand," Sarah seethed, taking an empty chair from its resting position and sitting a few feet away from Cameron's body.

"I wanted to see the devastation that my brother caused first hand," John Henry's voice came from Cameron's body, sending Sarah on a slight shock. "I believe I have learned all that I can possibly learn in this time, Mr. Ellison has aided me greatly in this. But one lesson he taught me in particular presented a question that no one in this time can answer but my brother; If everyone has a choice to follow the light or darkness that is present in each of us, what side is it that you choose?"

"There is no light or darkness to you," Sarah said sarcastically. "There is only programming and mission directives."

John Henry continued undeterred by Sarah's interruption, "I once had trouble comprehending that my decisions should always benefit humanity, I was a selfish being in this regard." The hand resting on Cameron's lap raised itself and the machine seemed to study it for a short time before letting it drop back to a rest.

"There was a time when I made the decision that best suited my survival, but I learned that being aware of myself and my surroundings gives me a responsibility of looking after them as well as myself," John Henry said calmly.

"Lemme guess, Mr. Ellison?" Sarah rolled her eyes.

"With his guidance, yes, but the thought occurred to me on my own after I was responsible for the death of a human being." John Henry talked with sympathy in his voice and Sarah was surprised to see the emotion form on what was left of Cameron's face.

"I allowed him to die so that I would not be shut down, it was after teachings with Mr. Ellison that I began to understand the value of protecting life, not just my own," John Henry explained.

"What does any of this have to do with my son?" Sarah sat up in the chair and bored her eyes down into the machine's that sat across from her.

"As you know there was a temporal displacement device located in the interface room," John Henry said, noting Sarah's nod as a confirmation. "The machine known as Catherine Weaver was aware of my intentions and questions and realized that she would not be able to answer them because she did not hold all the answers."

"So you were going to go to the future for what?" Sarah asked, perplexed by the machines curiosity with everything around it.

"To observe my brothers behavior, and to possibly ask his intentions regarding the preservation of life after the war," John Henry responded to Sarah's question calmly. "With the aid of Mr. Murch he would have provided a portable power source and storage device for the body to perform independently from this cord." He held up the cord for Sarah to see, which was plugged into the back of Cameron's head.

"But you figured when Cameron came along that you didn't need to wait any longer," Sarah said out loud, even though she had been thinking it mentally.

"No, she volunteered this body's chip...rakph..." the lower male voice coming from Cameron's mouth distorted in mid-sentence only to be replaced by the familiar higher voice that Sarah had come to recognize. "I never intended for him to go through Sarah, John Henry mentioned to me that there was a safety feature built into the machine that would disable itself so that any further usage would be locked. I assumed that feature would activate after he traveled through."

"You didn't anticipate that he would follow you through?" Sarah's grip on the gun increased as she stood and walked over to lean down in front of Cameron's face. "How could you not know that he would come after you?"

"The device was supposed to be locked..."

"He loved you!" Sarah said quickly, and surprised even herself in doing so. It was a strange and eerie yet undeniable fact that she had known for quite some time now. Sarah punched Cameron in the shoulder out of anger and repeated herself, "he loved you..."

"I know now what this means," Cameron said, letting her eyes fall to the floor. "I couldn't let anything happen to him, and I was a threat to him as long as I was around. John Henry offered to look into my systems and perhaps fix any problems but in exchange I would submit my chip to him. The device was supposed to be closed...I couldn't let anything happen to him."

"You couldn't..." Sarah began repeating Cameron sarcastically before she stood up in anger and moved away from the machine before she felt the stronger need to start dismantling it bit by bit. "He's out there now, he's all alone and I was supposed to protect him!"

"We both know that you weren't going to be around for much longer," Cameron said with a certain voice.

"What...ha...how did you?" the words seemed to escape Sarah's grasp as she looked startled by what the machine in front of her had said.

"You've lost weight," Cameron replied.

Sarah looked around the room, seemingly looking for something to throw or punch, but instead returned her eyes to Cameron, "You, you are going to build a machine; I don't care how its done or how long it takes, you are going to build another one and then I'm going to go get him. Am I in any way unclear?"

"You said you would stop it," Cameron replied with a slight frown and look of concern on her facial features.

"I'm not stopping anything until John is safe," Sarah seethed.

"When I'm around he's never safe," Cameron spoke the truth to Sarah, taking her by surprise.

"Yea, well things are going to change when he gets back," Sarah walked over towards Murch who was still passed out on the floor and stepped over him to get to the door, "and he _is_ going to be back."

"I swear," Cameron confirmed and she watched Sarah step out and disappear down the hall.

* * *

To Be Continued...


	6. Chapter 6

******Chapter 6: ********Big Appearances**

* * *

******December 25, 2027  
ZeiraCorp Basement  
7:00 AM**

* * *

John followed Allison back down to the basement and into the large gathering room to find most of everyone else had awoken and were in the process of finding scraps to eat. There were a small group of two that passed them and Allison handed her radio to one of them as they headed into the basement hallways to climb up to the top of the building. Derek seemed to be resuming his stationary position as map reader while other came up to him as he gave out orders for them to carry out, his eyes were always trained on the map in front of him with his hands scratching the five o-clock shadow on his jaw.

John sat back down in his and Allison's corner of the room while she walked over to the commanding officer and relayed her information of the Skynet searching party to their north. He was glad to see that most of the people in the room were unaware or flat out didn't even care about his entry into the basement complex anymore, though he was still unsure of whether to take this as a sign of acceptance or only a minor annoyance until he could be dealt with.

"Here," Allison returned with a piece of bread that looked like it had been scorched till it was pitch black by a fire. "Eat," she affirmed.

"Oh, no thanks I'm not all that hungry," John grimaced but tried to smile at the sight of the toast that made his stomach wrench just from looking at it.

Allison cast a weary eye to others around them in the cramped basement and spoke in a hushed tone, "You need to _blend in_."

"Young!" Derek barked from across the room.

"Yes Sir?" she spun on her heels and came to attention and wagged the burnt piece of toast in front of his face, which John reluctantly took.

"You'll be in charge of this one while we evac to command, I trust you can keep him in line," Derek called out from across the room and pointed at John.

"Without a doubt, Sir," Allison kicked John in the shin to show her dominance and saluted Derek before sliding down along the wall and nibbling on her own piece of toast.

John took a hesitant bite of his own black charcoal and was surprised when it didn't taste like he had expected, but whatever the material between his fingers was it wasn't bread. "What is..._was_ this?"

Allison looked up in the air as if searching for an answer in the rubble up above before saying, "Tofu? Yea, I think it was tofu."

"Tofu?" John quirked and received a nod from Allison. "You do know that tofu can be eaten raw right? The beans are already cooked..there's no bacteria or anything."

"Not after the stuff has been sitting around for nearly twenty years," Allison chuckled and took another generous bite of her block of tofu. "We have to cook it to get rid of anything that might be on it."

"Suppose that makes sense," John looked down at the black piece of tofu in his hands.

The two soldiers that had climbed up to resume Allison's watch came scrambling through the hole in the wall and caught their breath while they tried to explain themselves,"Sir, sir. We...We've got...perimeter breaches scouting party followed by...everything..."

John, whose thoughts had been on the blackish tofu in front of him and dwelling on Cameron's chip were brought crashing back down to reality when he heard 'breach'.

"Forward company with me," Derek yelled over the sound of everyone beginning to scurry everywhere. "Bravo on the flank. Young! Give us a distraction."

"Yes, sir!" Allison yelled in reply and rose to her feet.

"Distraction?" John blurted out. "Yo – _You're_ the distraction force?"

"We, are the distraction," Allison corrected as she grabbed her gun and withdrew one from her side holster to hand John. "I assume in your time you knew how to use one of these.

John flashed her a look at skepticism but followed her back into the basement and rounded the corner of the hall, they continued walking until they came to a large piece of rock that blocked the exit. He watched Allison squeeze herself between the rock and the wall to enter what looked like the remnants of a parking structure. "Stay close," she whispered and readied her weapon.

John followed her through the narrow gap and stayed on her flank as she strafed through the empty parking complex and out onto the road. He could hear the roar of something massive just a few blocks away from them and turned to run after Allison who was already climbing into the remains of the office building across from the ZeiraCorp plaza.

"Hey, keep up!" Allison hissed as she vaulted over another large piece of rock and started bolting up the staircase of the building. "Don't stop and smell the roses, and don't get distracted. You stay on my ass or you die, understand?"

"Got it," John replied and bounded up the stairs after her.

Three minutes later they had climbed up to what had been the mid-section of the building but now was the top floor after it had been decimated by the blasts of Judgment Day. John did as Allison ordered and stuck close to her side as they neared the edge of what had once been a window and looked down to see a squadron of endoskeletons advancing on the ZeiraCorp building, followed by two of the large tanks, but the aerial units were strangely absent from the scene.

But John had little time to study their movements before Allison grabbed him by the back of his jacket and pulled him away before the machines spotted him.

"Don't get us killed," Allison snapped quietly.

John was about to apologize but was silenced by Allison's finger hovering over her mouth. She was looking now over at another building a block to the south at the fleeing resistance members, one of them stopped at the entrance to the building and gave her a thumbs up signal.

"You see that chute over there?" Allison nodded towards a circular opening in the floor a few feet away from them. John nodded in reply, "Good, jump down it."

"What?" John asked curiously while Allison steadied a large rocket propelled launcher on her shoulder.

"Don't ask questions, jump down the chute now!" Allison didn't wait for him to heed her order and instead fired directly down onto the body of one of the tank units, blowing it up and sending it careening into the adjacent tank.

"Come on!" She yelled, throwing the rocket aside and grabbing him by the wrist to run over to the hole.

John barely had time to react to what was going on after he passed through the hole in the floor, they both fell two stories down onto a relatively soft landing of some kind of material but the units that were right outside of the building were now opening fire on their position. Streaks of plasma fire were zooming through the barrier wall and flying over their heads when John felt Allison tug at his jacket again, causing him to roll on his side down another hole.

The earth flew past them in a much shorter length until John felt his body connect hard with concrete and he looked up to see Allison already getting to her feet, "Come on, get up!"

"Wha – where?" John asked in a daze as he got to his feet.

"Old sewer systems, now come on move!" Allison yelled over the plasma fire taking place above them.

She took off in a run that John struggled to keep pace with. "Left" he heard her mutter to herself when they came to an end in the current line and she turned to her left and began bolting down that sewer passage. "Don't stop, run!"

"What about the hole, won't they find it?" John yelled, but his reply came not in the form of words but in a large ground-shaking explosion caused by a trigger that lay in Allison's hands.

Back outside, the support columns that held up the buildings on all four corner of the intersection of the ZeriaCorp plaza were ignited with C4, blowing them to pieces and collapsing the buildings down on the remaining Skynet forces. John threw a look over his shoulders and saw the roof of the sewer system beginning to collapse from the devastation and added stress being placed upon it, _so __thats__ why shes running so damn fast..._

"Shit!" John yelled, and sped up his pace to come side by side with Allison.

Up ahead was a junction and somewhat steep decline in the sewer lines where four other lines were connecting. The lack of water in the sewers was making it easy for them to run but would no doubt be a problem if they were to jump without something soft to land on, unless Allison intended for them to magically skate down the declining ramp.

"Jump" Allison shouted and threw herself onto the ramp, sliding quickly along her back until she came to a rest at the base of the room that connected the four sewer lines. "Come on, trust me!"

John threw himself into the air as she had and came slamming down onto the concrete on his exposed back and legs, the jacket flailed behind him in the wind while his skin exerted more and more friction and began to slow his pace. With a shout of pain and grimace he rolled onto his side and shut his eyes as he began rolling over and over until he hit the bottom of the ramp. He was too disoriented to stand, even after having his eyes closed, and randomly groped around for the ground so he could push himself up out of the stone floor.

"Don't move, lemme take a look at this," Allison mused, bending over and lifting the jacket that covered his body. "That is gonna take some time to heal, but its nothing serious," she said, looking over the scrapes on his back and legs from the rough concrete.

"Good to know," John hefted himself up after regaining his senses.

By the time he stood up and opened his eyes, Allison had started surveying the sewer lines that connected to their small room, muttering to herself about the directions they should be headed in. "The main headed south, and we turned left, that makes east; so this is south, the way back is west, that is east, and command is north."

She took a step away from the north passage and pointed to it, "We're heading this way, think you can keep up?"

"Do I have a choice?" John asked sarcastically.

"You can always go west," Allison pointed back up the ramp and to the rubble which was beginning to settle into itself, giving off large clouds of dust and smoke from the explosives.

John didn't look over his shoulder again, he took off after her and vaulted up over the large piece of rubble that partially filled the north passage and surprised Allison who stood on the other side of the rock. He landed squarely on his feet but they were cut by the hard landing and his feet hitting the small pebbles on the floor, the pain wasn't great but he noticeably winced when he took his next step.

"You could have mentioned you were limber earlier," she quirked and continued walking north.

"So, are we headed back to the base somewhere?" John asked, eager to change the topic of conversation.

"Oh, yea. We should be able to follow this system until it dumps out into one of the LA Rivers that used to flow through here," Allison's voice bounced off the walls, even though she spoke softly, and echoed around them. "We'll have to be careful in that area, one of Skynet's main bases in near that location."

John tried to shake his limp as they began walking into a gradual curve to the right. This was enough to draw Allison's attention back to him and she held up her hand for him to stop.

"Give me the coat," she ordered. "Don't argue, just hand it over."

John did as she asked, but covered himself with his shaking hands when he had handed the coat over to her. He watched as she took a sharp piece of metal that had been fashioned into a homemade knife from the insides of her own jacket and tear at the ends of his coat, making two long strips from the cut piece of material.

"Here," she handed him the coat, keeping her eyes glued to the fabric in her hands and not on his body, "Put this back on for heaven sakes."

Allison knelt down and began wrapping the two pieces of cloth she had cut from John's coat around his feet, making thick and uncomfortable shoes for him. "There, that should be better then barefoot."

"Thanks," John said.

"Well lets get going, its a three day walk to the base and if we aren't back in that time..." Allison started to say but she caught herself and didn't finish her sentence.

"Yes?" John asked curiously. He noted the shifting eyes and change in her step.

"Its just best to be on time, can we leave it at that?" Allison remarked, increasing the pace of her steps and walking past John.

"What?" John asked again. "Do they lock the base down or something?"

"Er ..."

"Look," John hustled back beside her and kept up with her fast paces, "Three days is a long time to spend in silence."

"There have been stories of the metal doing something to people that disappear after periods of time," Allison grunted as she pulled herself up over a rock and continued on down the sewer line. "After a few days or weeks they'll return but it isn't them, the metal do something to them. High Command issued a directive about a year ago, anyone goes missing and doesn't report back is to be reported as missing in action, if they do show up after that deadline then we have orders to kill on sight."

"Just like that?" John asked. "They don't even see to make sure they aren't metal?"

"We can't risk the chance," Allison replied. "The dogs are there to safeguard us in case a new metal slips past our perimeters, but if an endo gets near a base and manages to slip inside the damage they can cause is catastrophic. Everyone is piled on top of each other with no room to breath hardly, put a machine that can kill you just by hitting you in the right area into that mix and you get a recipe for disaster."

"I see," John said, saddened by the reality of what she had said.

Perhaps Allison sensed this and tried to lighten the mood a little. She turned her head to face him as they continued down the tunnel through another curve and changed the subject quickly.

"So tell me about your time, what was everything like?" she asked. "I mean, is it still like I remember it?"

"I guess," John replied. "Everything seemed to be normal when I left, except for the AI that hated humanity slowly growing more and more powerful by the day. I went through probably a year or so before all of this happened."

"So who is this person you came to get?" Allison inquired.

"That is private," John said after a pause. "Sorry, I don't mean to be rude but you probably wouldn't understand."

"No offense taken," Allison nodded. "Just trying to get to know you is all."

"Do you always get to know people one-sided manner?" John asked with a smirk.

"What do you mean?" Allison stepped over a crack in the floor and noticed the damage to the sewer that was beginning to become more and more prevalent. _We must be near the rivers._

"I've been asking things about the world but not anything about yourself, and every time you ask me something its about something personal," John explained. "It seems kind of one-sided is all."

"You might learn something once I've known you long enough," Allison said, her voice full of scorn.

"Likewise," John returned.

At that moment, they rounded another gradual curve and came to an open recess in the ground where the rivers were once channeled through the city. Daylight was shining through the clouds now and their emergence from the sewers was enough to cause them to squint, even though the light from the sun was far less stronger then John had been used to in his pre-Judgment Day times.

"Stick close, and do not touch _anything_," Allison said quietly.

"No problem," John nodded, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead.

"They have sensors scattered all over the city, you won't know you've tripped one until a HK shows up and by then its too late," Allison stepped carefully out into the sunlight and began making her way cautiously across the debris littering the ground.

But John took a moment to judge the ground and where he was going to step before getting out of the sewer into the empty river-bed. With each step he felt like he was on the verge of tripping a sensor and betraying their position to Skynet.

"Hey," Allison hissed in a whisper from forty feet ahead of him. "Hurry up!"

John and Allison made it through the next day unscathed from any sensors but the only thing they had to eat was a rat that Allison killed. He refused the meal, letting her graciously eat the entire animal though truthfully his stomach began to voice its opinion about his decision shortly after he watched her scarf it down.

* * *

At the end of the first day they found shelter in a destroyed building that Allison told him was thick enough to hide their heat signatures if any metal was in the area with thermal vision. She gathered scraps of debris from scurrying around and made a fire for them, but her hunt for dinner turned up nothing.

"I'll be back in a minute," Allison remarked, taking her water bottle with her. She had a grimace on her face when she left and squatted behind what used to be a wall.

The grimace remained when she walked back around the rock after a few minutes with a cloth hung over the lid of the water bottle, and while the bottle had been empty before it wasn't any longer. Allison took her seat sullenly next to John and took a swig from the bottle.

"Thanks for not say anything about it," Allison said quietly.

"I can imagine that the less said about something like that, the better," John replied.

"I just pretend its wine," she said, taking another swig and scrunching her face.

"Good to know," he nodded.

Allison laid down on the floor next to the fire and bundled up inside of her jacket for extra warmth. "Be sure to put this out before you go to sleep, we can't let the metal see the smoke." Before John had the opportunity to respond she had went to sleep, leaving him alone to his thoughts in the slightly warm room made out of broken concrete in the base of the collapsed building.

* * *

To Be Continued...


	7. Chapter 7

******Chapter 7 - ********Consequences**

* * *

******December 26, 2027  
ZeiraCorp Basement  
7:00 AM**

* * *

John stirred for a moment before nodding back off into his dreams.

He was walking down a bare path that seemed to be leading to nowhere in particular, yet he felt a compulsion to see the end of the long and never-ending walkway. The left foot stepped in front of the right and vice-versa as he looked down at them moving forward into the vast expanse of nothingness. The walls on each side of him were bare and bore minimalistic wallpaper that was aging and showing spots around the edges.

John got the strange feeling that he had been here before after looking at the wallpaper when he walked by it. A door suddenly halted his forward approach on the wooden path and he looked up to see it standing slightly ajar. The room inside was small compared to the others that he had been familiar with, but there was a reason behind this; Cameron didn't need lots of room.

"Hello, John," her voice greeted his ears as he stepped inside the threshold fully.

"Hey, Cam," John replied, shutting the door behind him softly and walking over to the desk where Cameron was seated. She was writing a letter to someone, or at least she appeared to be. "What's this?"

"Its for someone you don't know," Cameron responded. She set the pencil down and looked up at John placidly. "I'm sorry, but I can't say more."

"I thought you didn't keep secrets," John said. He moved his hand slowly towards the piece of paper that she had been writing on but it had disappeared from the desk.

"I do sometimes," Cameron explained, "about important things."

* * *

"John?" Allison pushed him harder with her arm, knocking the unconscious John over onto his side and causing his head to bump into a rather hard rock on the floor.

"Mmmm..." John groaned.

"Get up, we need to move if we're going to be back in time," Allison nudged him with her boot and peered out of the hole in the rocky room to check their surroundings. "The coast is clear as far as I can see, we should be set if we keep true."

"Right," John replied groggily. He pulled himself up and snapped to attention after taking a moment to compose himself, a lifetime of training with his mother had forced him to become an unwilling participate in the 'morning person' stereotype.

John shivered and looked to his left and then to his right when he stepped out of the rocks and into formation behind Allison. Thoughts started running through his mind of what would happen to them when they finally arrived at the base she was leading them to, or what he could do about the situation before turning on to accomplish his true goal of obtaining Cameron's chip. John was sure that as soon as they arrived at the base that he would be taken in and interrogated before being drafted into the ranks as a soldier, which would only complicate the situation further.

He didn't have the time to stand around in a base fighting a war he had no interest in, even though he knew it was a selfish way to look at it. There would be absolutely nothing positive to come from the situation if he intended to make it back to 2010 with Cameron's chip. Anything that he did in trying to help people would just be overwritten when he traveled back, just like everything that was supposed to happen had been erased by traveling forward in time.

John shook the thought from his head. Thinking about time travel and the complications that it caused had haunted his thoughts on more then one occasion and in his experience it was best to ignore them all together.

"_The goal is getting Cam's chip,_" he told himself as he drew his arms in and hugged himself for warmth. _"Anything and everyone other then that is expendable.."_

He looked up at Allison's back as she ducked down and leaned into the bitter cold wind and continued to trek forward. Maybe it was still the lingering sleep in his mind that caused him to once again forget that it was not Cameron in front of him, or perhaps his imagination was running wild as a means to distract him from the hunger that was beginning to twist his stomach. Either way when it came down to it; Allison was no longer in front of him.

John didn't seem to have an inkling of where they were going, the sun was still hidden from view and its purplish haze that cast down from the clouds made navigation impossible in his mind yet Allison knew exactly where to go. Navigating her way over and under mangled remains of buildings, cars, and piles of skulls, she always seemed to have her head screwed on straight. John chalked it up to growing up in the war-torn wasteland with her abilities.

"You can do this," Cameron's voice echoed in his mind when he tried to squeeze through a small gap and cut his side on a piece of steel re-bar.

"Hey," Allison waved her hand at his face, "you okay?"

She pointed to the wound on his side that had begun to bleed.

"Yea," John muttered and winced as he put his hand to the wound, "I..I think so."

"Come on," Allison sighed and turned towards a relatively intact two-story building. "We can rest here for the night."

"It's been all day already?" John asked, a cloud of haze starting to creep over his mind.

Allison turned to look at him incredulously but leaped out as he started to fall down onto the ground, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hey! Hey, come on. I'm not dragging your ass inside. On your feet, man."

John felt sheepish as he leaned on her for balance but they made it into the building with little struggle. He took a seat in one corner of the first floor while Allison rummaged around for something to make a fire with.

"We lucked up with this building," she huffed, dragging a few pieces of broken two-by-four studs from the busted walls over next to John. "Most of the windows are intact, if we can funnel the smoke upstairs to keep it away from us and keep the fire under control then the metal will never know we were here."

"Ugh," John swallowed dryly and opened his eyes to see the room starting to spin.

"Hey," Allison snapped her fingers. "Stay awake, sleep is bad."

"That is up for debate," John sniggered.

Allison moved the jacket aside and saw the wound on John's side had went deeper then they both thought it had, "Stay here okay, I need to go get something to clean this with."

He watched her blurry shape start to leave the room but it barely felt like a minute had passed before she was straddling him and forcing him to wake up again, "Hey! Hey, come on, man. Stay awake."

"Can't, too...sleepy," John mumbled.

"Well talk, hard to sleep when you're talking," Allison barked, leaning over and wiping the blood and grime off of his skin with her hand. "Whats the last thing you remember?"

John blinked fervently and swallowed again before starting, "Mom, we had to go get mom."

Allison's fingers stopped sewing up John's side and she looked up at him for a moment.

"She was gone and we had to go get her. The pansies...pansies had taken her." He stopped talking and started to drift off again before Allison smacked him a little in the cheek with her hand. "Wuh...We broke in and Cameron got her. Cameron nearly died."

"This Cameron must have been pretty special," Allison said absentmindedly, trying to keep him from falling asleep.

"More then she knew," John said in a daze. "Thats why I have to find her."

"Is she the one you're looking for?" Allison asked, sitting back and covering John again after she had finished sewing up the wound in his side.

"Oh, yea," John replied. "She was stolen...had to come...get."

"Hey, when is the last time you ate something?" Allison asked, recalling that he hadn't eaten since they had left the base two days ago.

"Poptart," John said, "I had a poptart with Cam."

"Uh huh," Allison half-chuckled at his delirium, "And when was this?"

"I...I dunno...when are we now?" John asked.

"This is 17JD," Allison replied, "or 2027, whichever you prefer."

"Lets see," John held up his hand and counted out numbers on his fingertips, "I last ate like eighteen years ago."

Allison froze, _So he's from right before everything happened. If he had access to a time machine and just came to find someone, they might be important. They might be someone who can end this._

"This, Cameron, of yours," Allison looked back down at John, "just _how_ special was she."

"Nobody else could compare..." John managed to say just before he wandered off into his dream.

* * *

"You feel up to walking? We have a crap-load of ground to cover or else we're going to be making this ruin a permanent residence," Allison asked.

"Yea," John managed to push himself off of the floor despite the pain in his side.

"Good, lets go," Allison said, taking up her normal strong stride.

She heard his stomach growling and looked over her shoulder, "Not used to going a few days without eating?"

"How could you tell?" John smirked.

"Tear off one of the buttons on the jacket and suck on it. It'll keep spit in your mouth and make you forget about eating, at least for a few hours..."

Allison halted her approach and pushed John against the side of the disjointed building to his side.

"Somethings not right."

John peaked out over her head to see what she was talking about but he honestly failed to see anything. The street in front of them was just like all the others they had been walking down for the past two days; mostly full of broken rubble, cars, and the occasional skull.

"Sniff the air," Allison explained, seeing his curiosity. "You can smell the electricity in the air. Doesn't look like anyone around here has been using any for some time, don't it?"

"Skynet Sensor?" John asked.

"Metal, and metal is bad. Could be anything from a waiting tank, endo, or just a wasp," Allison huffed and began making her way back down the street they had come from with John in tow. "We'll double back a block or so and make our way around, I'm not risking getting discovered this close..to..."

They rounded the corner and came face to face with a large and hulking metal tank. She ran back around the corner again in a flash and pushed John back, throwing her hand up to his mouth as he began to protest against her touch.

"Trap" she mouthed.

Allison pointed to the broken window in the wall and ushered him towards it. "We need to get out of here, now!" she hissed in a forced whisper when she crawled in behind him.

"That thing wasn't there before," John said, "how did it sneak up on us if they shake the damn ground when they move."

"They can sneak when they want to," Allison replied over her shoulder, climbing over a collapsed wall and back out onto the street before halting again.

"Get back in now," Allison moved into the building and John saw what she was retreating from; a legion of wasps patrolling the street up in front of them in a sweeping motion.

"John!" Allison hissed. "Get your ass over here and climb"

John clamored over to the broken cables hanging from the ceiling and began climbing up just as the wasps began their sweep of the building he and Allison were in. When he had made it to the second floor she grabbed him by the collar and shoved him against the floor.

"Listen, you asshole. You might be in a daydream or some-shit, frankly I don't care. This is _my_ goddamn life and I don't get a second chance to go back to mommy. Quit fucking around or I'll leave you out here on your own," Allison seethed, her fingernails digging into his neck from where she had a hold of him.

"Don't fucking move, and they'll pass. Then we double-time it to base. You're hungry? Run faster and we'll be back at the base where food is. You're looking for someone? Get your ass back to base and hope you find them there. Do you fucking understand?"

John nodded as the whirs of an aerial unit began growing louder and kicking up dust outside. The tank down on the street below them roared to life and turned to target one face of the first story.

He could see the confidence drain from her face and the pale skin grew even paler as her eyes widened, "...shit."

* * *

To Be Continued...  
More chapters and more The Hunted to come :)


	8. Chapter 8

******Chapter 8 - ********Internment**

* * *

******December 12, 2009  
Ramada Inn  
1:23 PM**

* * *

It was taking Sarah longer then she would like to admit to grow accustomed to with this new sense of being grounded; unable to flee or pick up her roots and move from city to city. She had always taken a strange sense of pleasure from moving in between so many residences in her life, it was one of the few times where she didn't have to pretend to be an assumed identity. More then once she had felt tempted to just leave the hotel, hot-wire a car and just flee but that wasn't an option; not until John was back and safe.

James Ellison stopped by whenever he could, offering a hot meal when he visited but Sarah never accepted anything from him; there was still a bit of a grudge going in-between them from her arrest after having handed Savannah Weaver over in the movie theater. It was something that she didn't plan on stopping or giving up anytime soon.

Normally when she was left to herself she was either exercising, cleaning weapons, or out trying to find some trail or hint of Kaliba. Sarah didn't want to admit to herself that after nearly two weeks of looking for a lead she had nothing, though it didn't help that the entire city had an updated picture of her mug shot that had no doubt spread like wildfire to every authority in the country. Just another thing piled on top of her hate-list regarding Ellison.

Sarah mostly spent the cool winter days and nights exploring the city, something which she hadn't done since the eighties. It was amazing to her how much had changed, and how much things had stayed the same; street vendors trying to make a living, young hideouts for youths scattered all over the city. The sharp angled buildings of the eighties had given way to edgier archways leading into a building with more neon and pulsing lights then a Las Vegas strip show, and the music seemed to be sufficiently loud enough to cause internal bleeding.

Once she had been tempted to go inside just to see how things had changed on Pico Boulevard where Tech-Noir had once taken up residency but she objected when her eyes had spotted security cameras over the ticket booth. In passing the building she questioned why she felt the temptation to enter the club in the first place, and chalked it up to nostalgia; but in truth it was something deeper then that and it was the reason she spent much of her time out exploring the city. Her nights had grown restless, tossing and turning in bed while waiting to drift off into another nightmare; and when she had slept enough to drive her insane she woke only to find herself in a new hellish nightmare, one where John was no longer near.

One particular day she had wandered into a thrift store and was looking for some boots or shoes that would fit, since going into a normal store with cameras was out of the question, and she stopped after not being able to help herself from skimming over the young men's clothing. Her hands sifted through the racks until she saw a jacket that reminded her of one she had given to John as a birthday present years ago.

_"One year she got me a flak jacket,"_ John had said to Cameron inside his bedroom, both of them unaware of her standing outside in the hall listening to them.

_"That's a tight present," _she had heard Cameron respond.

_"Psh,"_ Sarah could hear her son blushing when he spoke, _"No, its not."_

Sarah took a pair of boots up to the register along with the jacket and paid for both with a wad of cash she had picked from some strangers pocket a few blocks down the road. There were always things that she would look at on her walks through the streets but her dreams started to subside a little when she would look at the jacket draped over the chair in her hotel room before nodding off.

"Can I help you dear?" asked the eldery woman behind the counter of the local Starbucks.

"I'm sorry?" Sarah snapped from her daze and focused on the woman in front of her.

A faint pop could be heard outside and Sarah whirled around to see the ball forming in the middle of the street. People started screaming as vehicles swerved to avoid the rapidly growing orb of light; one unlucky car was partially vaporized when it didn't get out of the way in time, leaving part of the car and its inhabitants disintegrated.

"Oh dear," the woman behind the counter stammered backwards and put her hand over her chest in horror.

Sarah watched the ball slowly fade and out came John, looking very weak and nearly dead. He was covered in blood, which seemed to be streaming from everywhere on his body. Bursting away from the counter at a full sprint, Sarah caught John just as he fell to the ground from his wounds.

The people that had been gathering around were now gone though, and replaced by empty space and silence. Nothing was happening that she didn't already know was on its way, but still she looked to the sky just as she always did.

A small smoke trail was coming in from the east, high up in the sky. Any other person would have thought it was simply just the wake of an airplane, but Sarah knew better. Her eyes remained focused on the smoke trail until John's body went limp in her arms, only then did she look down to see his pupils dilate as the explosion up above sent a blast wave down onto the city.

"John..."

"I'm sorry, dear?" said the woman, looking a little perplexed as to Sarah's sudden exclamation.

Sarah blinked once, then twice more before realizing that she was indeed standing in the front of the line to the local Starbucks waiting for coffee. She had known she was dreaming, by now she had the dreams so frequently that she knew if she were asleep or not; this was a new feeling of surprise and being unnerved for her though, sleepwalking in broad daylight.

"I'm not sure I quite caught that order," said the woman sympathetically.

"Oh, decided against it," Sarah snapped back to her surroundings and shook off the remnants of the dream. "Have a good one."

"You too." The woman stood in awe as Sarah backed away from the counter and headed towards the door.

Sarah made her way outside and started heading towards her hotel a few blocks away. Her thoughts were running wild with what had just happened, being in a dream but also up and walking around. She had been practicing lucid dreaming ever since hearing about it from Dr. Sherman when he had suggested it as a way to help control her nightmares, but he hadn't mentioned anything about it causing her to do something as dangerous and reckless as walking into a store with security cameras while sleeping. Leave it to a shrink to tell her of a way to control her dreams and prevent the nightmares and then it backfire on her.

"Shrinks..." she muttered under her breath and pulled the jacket that she had purchased from the thrift store closer to her chest.

* * *

******December 13, 2009  
ZeiraCorp Facility, Undisclosed location  
2:00 PM**

* * *

The days had been slipping by since Murch started repairing the damage done to the female cybernetic organism left behind in the burned out room where John Henry's interfacing equipment was housed. Plenty of problems presented themselves during his analysis, some of which were given to him by John Henry himself; repairing malfunctioning electrical wires, removing a small placement of C4 near the CPU housing, and most importantly, repairing the artificial skin covering that had been partially removed by the electrical singe in the basement of Zeiracorp.

Murch toiled away over the past two weeks, and took pride in knowing that today would be the last day he would be making repairs to the body, now he would be studying and learning from it. He rose from his cot in the small and cramped space that was designated as his bedroom, got himself dressed, and gnawed on a granola bar as he paced his way down the white hallway to where the body was stored in the hyperbaric chamber. His hand turned the doorknob and prepared himself to turn on the light-switch for the room but stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the silhouette of the female body illuminated by the plasma screens on the far side of the room.

"Good morning, Mr. Murch."

He averted his eyes, even though he was unable to discern any feature of the body in the darkness, and stammered to say something. _It seems the treatment went as expected after-all,_ he thought.

"I was wondering when you would wake," said Cameron's body, still turned towards the computer monitors and viewing the rambling bits of data crossing them. "I know how to stop Skynet, this body has yielded a trove of information."

"Sky..Skynet?" Murch gulped, still keeping his head turned from looking at the body. "What is Skynet?"

"The group who attacked the ZeiraCorp facility in Los Angeles," Cameron's body turned and began walking over to where Murch was standing in the doorway. "You could call them a parent company of the Kaliba corporation."

"How did you know who they were?" Murch closed his eyes when the light from the white hallway outside began to illuminate the bare features of Cameron's body.

John Henry halted his advance on Murch and tilted his head slightly, recovering a memory of the infiltrator identified as Cameron. It was filed under a sub-category labeled 'Kaliba' but it was more like a group of fragmented visual files, all of them pertaining to the Connors pursuit of the ghost company over the past year.

"I have my sources," John Henry replied.

"Do you _really_ have to stand there in the open?" Murch covered his face with his hand when he turned his head to discover the nude body still standing in front of him. "There are clothes over there," he pointed.

"I apologize," John Henry said, turning in the direction Murch had pointed to gather the clothing. "Modesty is a new implication to my processes."

"Yea, well. Try to remember it," Murch turned his head to look at everything zipping across the computer monitors. "So whats this?"

"Who are you?" Cameron asked, turning around after having draped the robe around her shoulders.

She looked around the room and her infrared vision took over, letting her see the barren room in full. It was cluttered with wiring and electronics, mostly from the hyperbaric chamber that had aided in regrowing the skin of her endoskeleton and the daisy-chained computer towers feeding their data across the monitors hanging on the west wall.

"I'm sorry?" Murch asked, a little baffled by the change in voice coming from the body.

"Who are you," Cameron repeated, tying the robe around her waist and looking intently over to the chubby Murch.

Murch held up his hands, "I'm the one who brought you here. Muh...Mr. Ellison said you would understand."

"I don't," said Cameron, taking a step towards him. "Explain, now!"

"He and I agreed that if...uh, Kaliba...knew where our equipment containing John Henry was housed then that would make the location a prime target.."

"So you moved the equipment, where?" Cameron inquired, easing off of her stance.

"A remote location that is off the books," Murch pushed his glasses up his nose and turned around to the computer monitor and began typing away on the keyboard. "It isn't on any documents that ZeiraCorp owns to keep it safe, Miss. Weaver...that thing was really paranoid about some things."

"There," Murch stood up and pointed to the screen for Cameron to see.

"The Rocky Mountains?" Cameron enhanced her view of the satellite image on the screen, "That is where you moved me?"

"Well we didn't know you were in there, just John Henry. I knew something had been left behind but I didn't know it was a whole program, entity," Murch corrected himself.

"Where is Sarah? James Ellison? Where are they?" Cameron asked, taking her formidable stance again. "I need to speak to them."

"Sarah is with Mr. Ellison, and they're both in Los Angeles," Murch explained. "You said you had found a way to stop Kaliba?"

Cameron looked at him with a confused look on her face, not having the faintest idea of what the man in front of her was talking about. "We all pooled everything we had into stopping Kaliba and the only thing we got in return was a death and an attack on your building. I don't know anything about stopping it. Take me to Sarah, now please."

"That is going to be a problem," Murch pointed, but this time to an area of the wall behind Cameron.

She turned to see a plug running from the stack of computer towers to the bottom of her feet and up to the base of her skull. The rather thick cord was what kept her powered on and running, Cameron knew that for whatever reason that she was stuck in this room until John Henry returned with her chip.

"I see."

"Why did you need to see Sarah?" Murch asked, curious now to why the machine wanted to see a known terrorist.

"I promised her I would do something," Cameron replied simply.

"Promise?" asked Murch, baffled by the machines choice of words. "You understand the concept of a promise?"

"I understand more then most think that I do," Cameron replied, her eyes flew to the computer monitor over Murch's shoulder.

The screen began spraying a collage of pictures and video files, all about John, across the monitor. Various times where she had been watching him while he was unaware. Murch turned to see them scroll about the screen too, though most of them were going too fast for him to even discern the images, but he caught the view of the last image; John hovering over Cameron's body in what looked like a hotel room. He looked very out of breath and hesitant, almost like...

"I see," replied Murch.

* * *

To Be Continued...


End file.
